AInsights: Executive-level insights on the latest in generative AI….

OpenAI’s Sora produces groundbreaking video clips, democratizing and revolutionizing content creation

As you’ve probably heard, or most likely seen, OpenAI introduced its new generative AI video platform, Sora.

Sora can create stunning, realistic high-definition videos from text instructions or a still image as a prompt. It can generate videos in various styles, such as photorealistic, animated, or black and white, up to a minute in length.

Sora is currently limited to a select group of beta testers for evaluation and has not been made generally available.

Eleven Labs also introduced the ability to provide AI-generated sound to further bring the videos to life.

We were blown away by the Sora announcement but felt it needed something…

What if you could describe a sound and generate it with AI? pic.twitter.com/HcUxQ7Wndg

— ElevenLabs (@elevenlabsio) February 18, 2024

On the heels of the Sora announcement, Stability AI previewed Stable Diffusion 3 and opened-up a waitlist to test its performance and safety ahead of its official release.

Announcing Stable Diffusion 3, our most capable text-to-image model, utilizing a diffusion transformer architecture for greatly improved performance in multi-subject prompts, image quality, and spelling abilities.

Today, we are opening the waitlist for early preview. This phase… pic.twitter.com/FRn4ofC57s

— Stability AI (@StabilityAI) February 22, 2024

AInsights

Sora is both wowing and frightening experts. The potential for video creation in every potential application is incredible. At the same time, deepfakes are already causing concern and confusion. OpenAI itself is concerned about potential misuse. The company is developing tools to detect Sora-generated content and plans to include metadata in the outputs for identification purposes.

There is also the wonder and threat of generative AI videos in every imaginable application.

 

If we focus on the positive, because there are negatives and dangers too, Sora will give unprecedented video capabilities to novices and experts alike. Even one-minute clips will introduce stunning, creative, and professional videos into filmmaking, marketing, education, training simulations, gaming and virtual worlds, and entertainment.

https://twitter.com/briansolis/status/1758589348679971082

Even though this image for “SORAWOOD” was meant to be playful, AI will rewrite the script, making the future of Hollywood officially in production.

Actor, filmmaker, and studio owner Tyler Perry decided to halt an $800 million studio expansion after witnessing the capabilities of Sora.Perry expressed awe at how AI like Sora could revolutionize content creation, mentioning that he had already used AI in two upcoming projects to avoid lengthy makeup sessions. While recognizing the efficiency AI brings, Perry also voiced concerns about the potential job losses in the film industry due to this technology.

If Mr. Perry were to read this, rather than invest $800 million into a studio expansion, that budget could be retargeted to build the studio of the future, one where AI augments filmmaking. It could all start right now.

Sierra AI puts the customer back in service, making chatbots more conversational, and, human

I’ve known Bret Taylor from his FriendFeed days as web 2.0 was taking shape. We also worked together at Salesforce until he announced his return to his startup roots. I then left to join ServiceNow as Head of Global Innovation.

In addition to joining OpenAI’s board as chair, Taylor and Clay Bavor just introduced their new startup, Sierra.

I'm excited to announce @ClayBavor and my new company, @SierraPlatform, the conversational AI platform for businesses. With Sierra, every company can elevate their customer experience with AI. https://t.co/qP2r29L62m

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) February 13, 2024

Sierra is a conversational AI platform for businesses that aims to create a new engagement platform for customers. Like websites and mobile apps, Sierra creates a digital environment that contains the customer experience within a conversational domain powered by AI agents.

“Our thesis is really simple. We think that conversational AI will become the dominant form factor that people use to interact with brands, not just for the sort of current trends like customer service, but really for all aspects of the customer experience,” Taylor told TechCrunch.

What does that look like?

Think of the window as a prompt for action. Whether that’s seeking customer service, changing your mobile plan while you travel overseas, making changes to existing bookings, it gives you a connected system to find answers and achieve outcomes through conversations. AI agents are trained not only in conversational engagement, they’re also trained to be empathetic.

Melissa Ziegler, VP of Marketing at OluKai said this about Sierra, “Observing the AI agent respond empathetically to customers, mirroring the approach of our human agents, was astounding.”

AInsights

Just two years ago, no customer would ever say, “I hope I get to talk to a customer service chatbot today.”

But that’s all changing.

We’re entering a really interesting and accelerated time in which we are witnessing the rapid evolution from dumb chatbots that served as the front-end to basic knowledge bases to hallucinating chatbots to incredibly connected and capable AI agents.

This is the beginning of a new wave of AI orchestration and agentive AI services.

I once said that generative AI represents the opportunity to help humanize traditional business transactions. Sierra is built on an intelligent conversational foundation intended to deliver an end-to-end customer experience within a dedicated environment.

Agents can be trained on company identity, polices, processes, knowledge, and even culture and persona. But this presents companies with opportunity and challenges.

If you bring a traditional “service as a cost-center” mentality, you’re likely to miss the point. If you bring a “surprise and delight the customer” motivation, you’ll elevate experiences, satisfaction, loyalty, and growth. But that means you have to reimagine the processes, workflows, a language to deliver outcome-based experiences Sierra is capable of facilitating.

NVIDIA turns your Windows PC into its own LLM with its new local AI chatbot, “Chat with RTX”

NVIDIA released Chat with RTX, an AI-powered chatbot that runs locally on a Windows PC running Windows 10 or higher with the latest NVIDIA GUP drivers.

Different than ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, etc., Chat with RTX analyzes and summarizes data from the files on your system without sending data to a cloud server. This includes your docs, notes, videos, and other personal data.

https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1757429733837418610

Chat with RTX also supports YouTube links, which then interprets the content in the video and answers your questions. This is done by pulling from the data from the closed captions file.

NVIDIA describes it as having the ability to leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), TensorRT-LLM, and RTX acceleration, users can query a custom chatbot to quickly get contextually relevant answers. Everything runs locally on Windows RTX PCs or workstations, making results fast and secure.

Chat with RTX is available as a free download, and the installer is 35GB.

AInsights

In the previous edition of AInsights, we explored OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his multi-trillion-dollar quest to introduce an AI chip competitor to NVIDIA. Here we see a reversal of roles. Jensen Huang stepping into the software arena and Altman attempting to enter the hardware game.

This is an interesting and promising experiment in localized SLMs (small language models) to personalize your own experiences and make the most out of information you didn’t think to use or information you wish you could use but couldn’t.

I recently read an article because of its headline, “Why It’s So Hard to Search Your Email.” That’s the point. The same is true for local files. It isn’t just about trying to find the right file, it’s about finding, making sense of, and unlocking value from your content.

It reminds me of the new battle for search between Google and companies like Perplexity. It’s the difference between an algorithm and a human algorithm. The latter is based on your data.

We’re at the cusp of personal AI that makes sense of, build on, and helps you optimize and augment, you.

Note that it’s resource intensive, meaning RTX is taxing the system to perform these tasks. So, your mileage may vary. But it is the start of something more profound, personal, and localized.

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